"When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and the ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a good book."
—Christopher Morley

"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
— Mortimer J. Adler

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."
— W.H. Auden

"Reading maketh a full man."
— Francis Bacon

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider."
— Francis Bacon

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"Books are not men and yet they stay alive."
— Steven Vincent Benet

"An ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books...and thenceforward have at least one place in the world where it is possible to be happy."
— Augustine Birrell

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
— Joseph Brodsky

"Books we must have though we lack bread."
— Alice Williams Brotherton

"Books are men of higher stature, And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration."
— Andrew Carnegie

"To read and drive the night away."
— Geoffrey Chaucer

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."
— Chinese Proverb

"After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless."
— Chinese proverb

"A room without books is as a body without a soul."
— Cicero

"The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read."
— Tom Clancy

"The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age."
— Issac d'Israeli

"A truly great book should be read in youth, once again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
— Robertson Davies

"The book is man's best invention so far."
— Carolina Maria de Jesus

"I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage."
— Charles de Secondat

"When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it."
— Marie de Sevigne

"Why are we reading if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? "
— Annie Dillard

"Once you learn to read you will be forever free."
— Frederick Douglass

"It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own."
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
— Elizabeth Drew

"Never judge a book by its movie."
— J.W. Eagan

"I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."
— T.S. Eliot

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."
— Charles W. Eliot

"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than was there before."
— Clifton Fadiman

"Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend."
— William Feather

"Reading early in life gives a youngster a multitude of "friends" to guide intellectual and emotional growth."
— Carroll D. Gray

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."
— Elizabeth Hardwick

"It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."
— S.I. Hayakawa

"From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings."
— Helen Hayes

"When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I cannot live without books."
— Thomas Jefferson

"A book that [is] fitly chosen is a life long friend."
— Douglas Jerrold

"Perhaps no place is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirment is interest. "
— Lady Bird Johnson

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."
— Franz Kafka

"Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends."
— Helen Keller

"I have sought rest everywhere, and only found it in corners and books."
— Thomas a Kempis

"The unread story is not a story: it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula LeGuin

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."
— Amy Lowell

"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend, and inside a dog, it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx

"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."
— Groucho Marx

"Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books-they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past."
— Esther Meynell

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
— Mary Wortley Montagu

"Read,every day something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking."
— Christopher Morley

"When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life."
— Christopher Morley

"Reading books removes sorrows from the heart."
— Moroccan proverb

"Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
— Kathleen Norris

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."
— P.J. O'Rourke

"The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life..."
— George Orwell

"Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"People only learn through two things. One is reading and the other is association with smarter people."
— Will Rogers

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself."
— Romain Rolland

"There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book-the past and the future entrancing each other."
— Roger Rosenblatt

"Books tap the wisdom of our species-the greatest minds, the best teachers-from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient."
— Carl Sagan

"One of the greatest gifts adults can give-to their offspring and to society-is to read to children."
— Carl Sagan

"When you not only hear a treasured story, but also are pressed against the most important person in the world, a connection is made that cannot be severed."
— Maurice Sendak

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
— Richard Steele

"Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness."
— Irving Stone

"A good book should leave you...slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."
— William Styron

"Books, the children of the brain."
— Jonathan Swift

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations."
— Henry David Thoreau

"On how to read: I always begin at the left with the opening world of the sentence and read towards the right, and I recommend this method."
— James Thurber

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled."
— Barbara Tuchman

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard."
— Alice Walker

"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them-with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."
— Eudora Welty

"Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi."
— Oprah Winfrey